1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to a method and system for providing passengers using transit systems with detour information in a manner that protects the privacy of the passenger's and operator's data from being exposed to parties outside of the system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Detouring systems for transit operators of the prior art require all operators to upload their transit data to the detouring service provider (third party), so as to mine the passengers' travel patterns. Examples of such systems are described in WO2001063536 A1 and WO2013171780 A1. Such a travel pattern mining approach is mainly a two-step process: 1) chain the trips of each passenger to journeys according to the trip origin, destination, and time range; and 2) search for patterns in the chained journeys and store the found patterns as the passenger's travel patterns. When a disruption in a transit route happens (thereby triggering a need for a detour), the operator informs the detouring service provider of the latest disruption information, e.g., the service disrupted and expected service resume time. The detouring service provider then identifies the affected passengers through comparing the passengers' travel patterns with the disruption information, and search detours for those affected. In addition, systems of the prior art help the operators estimate the travel demand changes during disruption through analyzing the affected passengers' detouring behaviors. This approach enables effective detouring services, but the privacy of transit data is not protected. This privacy issue may prevent such solution from being applied in commercial systems.
The privacy issue can be addressed by utilizing the passengers' own mobile devices for transit data storage and mining. Mobile devices have been used as computing resources in various applications such as described in EP2628101 A1 and US20130203043 A1. Using this approach, the operators upload transit data to the corresponding passengers' mobile devices periodically. On the mobile devices, an application can be installed to analyze the travel patterns as discussed above. When a disruption happens, the operator will send the disruption information to all passengers' mobile devices, and the installed application will identify whether the passenger is affected and search detours of the affected journeys. Using this approach, the data privacy is protected as the transit data is not shared with any third party. However, with this approach the detouring services are limited. The approach cannot assist the operators in estimating the travel demand changes due to service disruption, as the passengers' travel patterns and detouring behaviors are only available to the passengers themselves.